Facebook Bans User's Ad Campaigns For Displaying Google+ Ad

from the all-i-see-is-sand dept

There's a longstanding myth about ostriches that, when frightened, they will bury their head in the sand and pretend the danger isn't there. This, of course, is ridiculous. Such horribly unadaptive behavior would have been bred out of the species by the evolutionary process (or by whichever God you believe in tweaking his code a bit) as hungry African predators would have delighted in seeing stationary feathery meals. See, that isn't how you behave when you're threatened. You don't just pretend like the threat doesn't exist.

Unless you're Facebook, of course.

As reported by CNET, apparently a user of both Facebook and Google+ wanted to cross-pollinate his social networking farms and, since Facebook is still the more fruitful territory at the moment, decided to take out an ad with Facebook to get folks to add him on Google+. These two are, of course competitors, currently vying for users attention and loyalty. Apparently Facebook believes the best way to do that is to not only block this gentleman's Google+ ad, but all of his ads on Facebook. The notice he received?

Your account has been disabled. All of your adverts have been stopped and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an account if too many of its adverts violate our Terms of Use or Advertising guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms of Use and Advertising guidelines if you have any further questions.

In other words, we're banning your ads because we're banning your ads. The CNET article tries to dig into Facebooks advertising TOS, but basically comes up with nothing other than that they reserve the right to ban for any reason including promoting competing products.

So Facebook, embroiled in a war to win the hearts and minds of internet users, is pretending that the war doesn't exist. There is no Google+, at least not in Facebook-Land, where everything is milk, honey, and Farmville requests. We know why ostriches didn't evolve this kind of behavior.

So what's going to happen to Facebook if they keep their heads firmly entrenched in the sand?

Reader Comments

Re: Facebook shill or DH hater?

I'm just surprised you made it through a post without a poo or penis joke :b

He was probably distracted by the nature documentary unfolding in the comment threads. (Yes, I realize that this timeline makes no sense as the comment thread didn't develop until after he posted his penis-joke-free post, but if you look at it from the view of a late-coming commenter [there's part of a penis joke], it all makes a sort of cosmic sense and also explains why some of my posts are heavily edited by others before they make it out into the wild.)